Things That Fall

by Mere Joyce

  Of course, I don’t actually know a damned thing about Shirley and Simon’s matrimony. I haven’t seen Forrester’s family in ten years. And ten years ago, I didn’t care what our parents were up to, so long as it didn’t interfere with my fun. Still, the news sits heavily on my lungs. My dad is a Facebook junkie. I know he hasn’t talked to his brothers in years. But I find it hard to believe he never heard this news through the online grapevine of gossiping grown-ups.

  Forrester raises his eyes, but not to look at any of us. He gazes at the playground a ways off in the park. It’s full of laughing children, their squeals musical and mocking.

  “It was messy, the divorce,” he says, the words so quiet they’re hard to decipher. I lean in to hear him better and notice his cheeks are sunken. He hasn’t eaten much in the last few days, I bet. “I don’t really know what happened. They’d been arguing a lot for a while. Then the arguments turned into fights, and then the fights turned into a divorce. Mom married some business guy she met in Toronto six months later. A far cry from me and Dad. He already had two kids of his own, and they’re happy now, I guess. She’s started over with a whole new family. I think that suits her.”

  “Forrester,” I breathe, but I can’t complete the thought. “I’m sorry” lingers behind my lips, stupid and unhelpful. His dad just died. There’s no point in me apologizing now for his parents’ well-past divorce.

  “That’s still no excuse for her not to be here,” Allison says, her voice tinged with annoyance.

  “Wouldn’t she want to come — for you, at least?” Kayla adds.

  Forrester scoffs, shaking his head.

  “She doesn’t care about Dad or me. She moved last year. New guy’s American, and they’re living somewhere in Colorado now.” He lets out a long breath. Any glint of anger he may have been stoking is snuffed out by it. “When my parents split, I got a choice, and my choice was to stay with Dad. She made a new life without us in it, and that doesn’t change now Dad’s …” he trails off, the words cut short by a breath sharp and scared.

  “So, who have you been staying with since … since Tuesday?” Kayla asks, interrupting my fantasy of hunting Shirley down and giving her a good slap for making her son do something like this on his own. It takes a beat for me to understand her question, but when I do, my fury increases. If Aunt Shirley is out of the picture, and none of us saw him last week, it’s not difficult to guess who Forrester has, or has not, been with since the death of his father.

  Uncle Simon died at work, and when I heard how it happened I thought it was an awful place to go. Now I’m not so sure. I’m glad he had his heart attack at the construction site and not at home. If he’d been at home, his son would have found him.

  Forrester avoids answering the question, which gives us all answer enough. He turned eighteen at the end of May. He’s a big boy, capable of spending a few days on his own. Even if by all accounts he shouldn’t.

  “How does he look?” he asks, veering the conversation to a new morbid topic.

  Visitation will be wrapping up soon. The actual burial service will take place graveside, where my uncle will join his parents who died in a car crash before I was born. I’m not going to the service. I’ll take my siblings home, where we’ll eat junk and dance to music loud with drumming until our parents get back and my mother snaps at us to turn it off. Then I’ll choose one of the boys from my contacts list and drown the memories of today in sweat and kisses.

  But right now my uncle’s still inside the funeral home, lying in his shiny new casket with his eyes closed and his hands folded over his ribs. I didn’t study the body or anything, but I saw enough of it when I arrived to know he looked poised and groomed, neat and tidy. And dead. He definitely looked dead.

  I don’t want Forrester to see it. Remembering his father hours before his death is much better than remembering him days afterwards.

  “He looks good,” Nolan says, when no one else manages to speak. “They did a good job with everything. It’s all … tasteful.”

  “Good.”

  Forrester nods his head and then slumps into silence. I continue rubbing his back, while on the other side of the street the first mourners to leave slide like shadows across the parking lot. Lucky bastards. They’ll go home and forget anything sad even happened. I thought I would too, until I got here and remembered Forrester. It’s a fitting punishment. I’ll feel guilty when I go home to two parents and a couple of siblings. But I should feel guilty. Before today, I hadn’t given a fucking thought to anything more than the money I’d miss out on by not flipping burgers this afternoon.

  Forget Aunt Shirley. I should be giving myself a good slap for being so selfish.

  “What will you do now?” Eli asks after a long moment of quiet has passed. I jump, startled by the sudden noise, Eli’s voice far deeper than I would have imagined from his gangly figure. I guess I’d been expecting a child’s voice. Part of me wants to believe it’s still a group of children sitting here.

  “What do you mean?” Forrester asks, struggling to focus.

  “Well, now that your father’s dead and your mother’s gone,” Eli continues, his heavy voice dropping onto the table like hunks of lead. Eli was always blunt as a child. I don’t know whether it’s enchanting or a major disappointment to see he’s retained the quality.

  “Eli,” Allison hisses.

  She gives her brother a sharp nudge, but Eli’s look stays blank. He’s unaware he’s made any remark someone might consider insensitive.

  “I’m not sure,” Forrester says, unbothered by Eli’s phrasing. “I keep asking myself that question, but I’m really not sure. One thing at a time, I guess. I’ve given notice on our apartment, and there’s an outstanding mortgage on the cottage, so the bank’s going to be selling it. I’ll be going up there next weekend to get it ready for showing … some agent called and said they wanted to try their hand at a quick sale to take advantage of the late-season warmth.”

  “You have to pack up the cottage all by yourself?” I ask.

  Forrester shakes his head. “No, there’ll be movers for that. I just have to go and clean it up, clear out the personal stuff, that sort of thing. Make it ready for showing, whatever the hell that means.”

  “But next weekend is Thanksgiving,” Kayla says.

  My eyes are wide with incredulity. “And you’ll be there all alone?”

  “No,” Thomas says, before Forrester can reply. “No way. You spending the whole weekend up there?”

  “Yeah.” Forrester nods.

  “I’ll come up, then,” Thomas says. “We’ll do it together. Nolan, you can come, too.”

  Nolan flounders in surprise until he catches his brother’s gaze. Then he nods.

  “Sure, I’ll come up,” he agrees.

  The relief is easy to see in Forrester’s eyes. He probably hadn’t even thought to ask for help, but it’s obvious he needs it. The task would be momentous under the best of circumstances, cleaning and packing things away to get ready for a sale. But the cottage has been around longer than any of us, and to go there alone, and because of what happened …

  “I’ll come, too,” I blurt. I have to work next weekend, and I’ve already made plans with friends. But my plans can go to hell. I can’t ignore this. Even with Thomas and Nolan there, it’ll be hard work going through the entire cottage.

  “Thanks, Hailey,” Forrester says, and I smile in spite of myself.

  “I’ll be there as well,” Kayla chimes in.

  “I can’t guarantee I’ll be the best company,” Forrester says, his lips smirking, his eyes not.

  “Count us in, too,” Allison says, gesturing to herself and her brother. “I’ll have to cash in some favors, but I think I can get next weekend off.”

  Eli gives his twin a sideways glance he thinks the rest of us don’t see. If it were up to him, he’d make an excuse to avoid this excur
sion. But Allison responds to his look with a pointed stare of her own, and Eli backs down under his sister’s glower.

  “We’ll need the address,” he adds, not bothering to disguise his discontent. “I don’t think I can get us there by memory.”

  Nolan’s quick to pull his phone from his pocket. He makes a note to himself with the address and inputs our numbers so he can text it to us later.

  My parents won’t be thrilled when I tell them of our plan. This isn’t a group of random kids I met while walking in the park, and it’s not like I haven’t stayed out way past curfew with boys I barely know, anyway. But they’ll have a hard time wrapping their heads around why I want to go.

  If they ask, I’ll keep it simple and cite the guilt. My mother will roll her eyes, and Dad’s face will turn red, but then they’ll understand. They have to. No way are they guiltless themselves. They might even suggest coming with me, rallying a few more adults to help get everything in order. I’ll fight against them if they do, though. I don’t want them there. I don’t want any of the parents there. It’s their fault we’re sitting here as vague acquaintances in the first place.

  Spending a weekend with people I haven’t seen in years might be fucking awful. We might have nothing in common, and by the time the weekend is over we might still be nothing more than distant relatives.

  But if the stars favor us, there’s a chance this horrible week could offer at least one happy outcome. The odds might be garbage, but I’m willing to risk it.

  Once the details have been confirmed, Kayla stands, stretching her short neck as she watches the figures milling around the funeral home’s parking lot.

  “I’d better get back,” she says with an apologetic shrug.

  I nod, giving Forrester’s shoulders a final squeeze before I join her.

  “Marissa and Liam will be in desperate need of company,” I agree. Mom and Dad will stay until the end, but I’ll take my sister and brother home soon.

  “I think it’s nearly over, anyway,” Allison says as she, Eli, and Nolan mimic our actions and get up from the table. Thomas is the only one to stay seated with Forrester.

  “Want to go get a coffee or something?” he asks.

  Forrester shrugs his shoulders again, his expression cloudy like he’s unable to make the decision for himself. Thomas catches my gaze, and his head tilts in an almost imperceptible nod. The rest of us are welcome to go, but he won’t leave Forrester alone.

  “Come on, I’m starved. We’ll get some doughnuts, too,” he says, half-hauling Forrester up. “I’ll even let you have the one with sprinkles,” he adds in a tempting voice. I remember those special mornings as kids when fresh doughnuts were brought in for a surprise sugary breakfast. Forrester always wanted something with sprinkles, but with Thomas nearby, he never had the chance.

  Now Thomas grins, and after a long, hesitant pause, Forrester smiles in return.

  I let all the air out of my lungs, drawing a fresh breath as I link arms with Kayla and head back to the funeral home.

  Kayla

  DESPITE THE WARM WEATHER, the signs of fall are around us. Three days after my uncle’s funeral, I have to brush a scattering of red-orange leaves from the hammock in my backyard before I climb onto it and dial Hudson’s number. I watch the streaking white of a plane flying overhead as I wait for him to answer. Except for the plane, the sky is clear, and looking up, it’s easy to imagine I’m staring at a sky made in August. Fall beneath me, summer above. The mingling of the seasons is like living within a new climate altogether.

  “Hello, gorgeous,” a sly voice says through the speaker.

  I smirk, pressing the phone closer to my ear as if it can bridge the over two-hundred-mile gap between Sudbury and Aurora. I still don’t understand why Hudson had to go to Laurentian University. There are tons of schools closer to home. Why couldn’t he be living in Guelph or Hamilton? Better yet, why couldn’t he have gone to York and commuted from our hometown?

  “Hey, Hudson,” I sigh, heat warming my cheeks after hearing him speak just those two words. I’m pathetic. Hudson’s been my boyfriend for more than a year, my friend since elementary school. But whenever he so much as hints at the intimacy between us, I melt.

  Still, it’s hard to mind being pathetic, when pathetic feels so nice.

  “What’s up, hun? You never call during the week.”

  He’s correct, but only because of habit. Hudson’s parents never let him talk on weeknights when we were both still in high school. Now he’s a freshman in university, and I suppose he can talk whenever he wants. But he’s only been away for six weeks, and it takes a while to figure out a new routine. Besides, we mostly text or video chat, anyway. Calling him at all is a rarity now, weekday or otherwise.

  But this is too important for a text and too urgent to wait for our usual Friday night video chat.

  “Look, there’s a bit of a problem with this weekend,” I tell him. A breeze blows hair across my eyes. I try to clear my line of sight with my free hand.

  “Don’t tell me your parents decided to have dinner on Saturday,” he says. I can hear the muted sounds of his roommate playing a video game. “To the right!” Hudson calls, and something that sounds like gunfire rattles in the background.

  “No,” I say with enough force to pull his attention back. “We’re still having dinner on Sunday.”

  Hudson’s only coming home for two days over the Thanksgiving break. He’s driving down Saturday morning, and we’re spending the day together before each of our families has Thanksgiving on Sunday. Or, at least, we were. I’ve been putting off telling him about the change of plans. I haven’t seen Hudson since he left for school at the end of August. This weekend is supposed to include one full day of him and me making up for every second we’ve lost over the past month and a half.

  Only, now things have changed.

  Gazing out across the backyard, I listen to the wooden wind chimes clattering from their post by the deck as I lower my foot to the ground and give the hammock a push.

  “Okay, then, what’s up?” he asks.

  My breath is quiet as I work to hide my unease. “I’m not going to be around.”

  Even admitting this much hurts. Six weeks is nothing in terms of habits and learning to break them. But six weeks without the boy I’ve spent almost every day with over the last year?

  My heart burns with the reality of our separation, and the anticipation of seeing him — of holding his hand and hugging and kissing him until my body’s so weak I can’t stand — has been enough to keep my dreams full and my sleep restless. I didn’t think about Hudson when I agreed to go to the cottage this weekend. If I had, perhaps I would have made an excuse to bow out.

  I can’t quite decide what would have been the better decision. I won’t back out now that I’ve made a promise to help, but my conviction doesn’t diminish the awful pinch in my chest. After this weekend, Hudson won’t be back until sometime in November. He’s not even coming back now for the proper length of the weeklong break he gets from classes. Saturday’s the only day we get to see each other, and I’m throwing it away for a group of people I don’t even know anymore.

  I tell him what’s happened. He knows about my uncle, of course. He knew within hours of me knowing myself, and we’ve talked — or at least texted — every day since then.

  “I get that you want to help your cousin,” Hudson says once I’ve related all the details. The background is quiet now, no more firing guns or other pixelated explosions in the distance. Hudson must have crept out into the hallway. “But you haven’t seen these people in forever. So why do you have to see them now? I mean, can’t you put it off until next weekend? Or, you know, make plans to go out for dinner sometime? Come on, Kayla. It’s our one day together.”

  His frustration makes the ache worse, although I’m not upset enough to shed tears, which is a relief.

 
“It’s important I go,” I say, proud to hear the self-righteous gleam creeping into my own words. I cry too often, and I’m impressed my voice is as steady as my cheeks are dry. “I know I haven’t seen them in a long time, but …”

  I try to think up the correct response. Claiming family as the be-all-end-all excuse won’t do. I share bloodlines with these people, but that doesn’t mean we have to be close, that we even have to like each other. And Hudson is family, too. He’s not blood, but he’s heart, and to me that means more. Still, there was something special about me and my cousins, once. We weren’t just relatives. We were friends. And friends are heart, too.

  Besides, something else has been nagging at me since Saturday. I keep remembering the way my dad stood watching his brothers at the funeral, all of them present, none of them communicating.

  “When you’re seven and your parents stop talking to your relatives, you don’t think to ask why,” I say, hoping Hudson remembers enough of my family’s history not to get lost in my rambling. “I’m not sure I even noticed, at least not for a while. And when I did notice, well — time had passed. It’s not something you keep track of … and that’s a problem. Hudson, I need to figure out what happened. I want to know why my dad stopped talking to his brothers. They were close once. All of us were. I’m ashamed of myself for never giving it more thought before.”

  Hudson is quiet on the other end of the line. The silence is not unusual. He’s reflective, taking his time to work through his thoughts.

  “It does seem odd,” he says at last, his voice both disappointed and intrigued, “that your dad would stop talking to his brothers in the first place. I mean, I know your dad … I never would have guessed he’d be the type to hold that sort of grudge.”

  “I wouldn’t have, either,” I say, relieved he understands at least this part of it.